SBF's Alameda Moved $89 Million Worth of Crypto Into a New Wallet
The now-defunct and bankrupt trading desk moved $2.7 million worth of Serum, FTX, and Uniswap tokens into the wallet yesterday, on-chain data shows.
In the past 24 hours, Alameda Research has moved $2.7 million worth of Serum, FTX, and Uniswap tokens into a wallet where the now-bankrupt trading desk has amassed $89 million worth of assets, according to on-chain data.
As of this writing, none of the wallets—all labeled as belonging to Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm Alameda Research by blockchain analytics firm Nansen—have tried to move the funds since yesterday.
The transactions are just the most recent unexplained transfers by wallets belonging to Alameda Research following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of FTX Group, which includes FTX.com, West Realm Shires (the parent company of FTX U.S.), and Alameda Research.
On Saturday, Alameda Research moved $36 million worth of funds—$31 million worth of BitDAO tokens (BIT), $5 million worth of SushiBar tokens, and $1 million worth of Render tokens.
Alameda purchased 100 million BIT tokens last year from BitDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that was founded last year by Singapore-based exchange Bybit and backed by Peter Thiel, the Thiel-founded Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Dragonfly Capital.
Alameda used FTT to purchase the BIT tokens and, as part of their agreement, the organizations agreed that neither would sell the other’s tokens before November 2024. Earlier this month, BitDAO demanded that Alameda prove it hadn’t liquidated the tokens after BIT suddenly dropped 20%. Now, all 100 million of the BIT tokens appear to be in the wallet where Alameda has been transferring funds from its other wallets.
Alameda, founded in 2017 by Bankman-Fried and Tara Mac Aulay, is a quantitative trading firm and the sister company to FTX. Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019 but didn’t step back from the day-to-day at Alameda Research until July 2021. When he did, Caroline Ellison and Sam Trabucco were appointed co-CEOs. Trabucco stepped down in August, saying on Twitter that he couldn’t “personally continue to justify the time investment of being a central part of Alameda.”
Although Bankman-Fried maintained that Alameda Research, the trading desk, and FTX, the exchange, were separate entities, a leaked balance sheet has shown that Alameda was heavily dependent on being able to borrow customer assets from FTX.
The news prompted Binance to announce that it would be liquidating its FTT position, worth $580 million at the time. The news rattled investors, who withdrew billions from FTX over the course of 48 hours. Eventually, FTX ran out of funds to honor withdrawals and announced that Binance had expressed its intent to acquire FTX. But within a day, that deal fell apart and on Friday FTX filed for bankruptcy.